The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This paper describes a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers qualitatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and tablebased) approaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability.

The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will become increasingly more important to provide tools that allow people (and software) to quickly find the services they need, while minimizing the burden for those who wish to list their services with these search engines. This can be viewed as a critical enabler of the `friction-free' markets of the `new economy'. Current service retrieval technology is, however, seriously deficient in this regard. The information retrieval community has focused on the retrieval of documents, not services per se, and has as a result emphasized keyword-based approaches. Those approaches achieve fairly high recall but low precision. The software agents and distributed computing communities have developed...

A requirements analysis in the emerging field of Semantic Web Services (SWS) (see

Many project scheduling and management software systems are being employed in the construction industry. Standards-based translation is one way to achieve interoperability. This study discusses the applicability of the Process Specification Language (PSL) for exchanging project scheduling information among different applications. PSL was initiated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and is emerging as a standard exchange language for process information in the manufacturing industry. This paper explores how PSL can be used for exchanging project scheduling information among software programs in project management. Furthermore, we investigate how PSL could be utilized to reason about potential conflicts and to perform consistency checking on project scheduling information.

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Abstract. Ontological engineering is currently being used by a range of functional domains to support the capture and sharing of information and knowledge. It has long been recognised that ontologies provide a basis for sharing meaning. However, several reasons explain how the management of knowledge contained in ontologies can be biased in a number of ways, which inevitably leads to the creation and use of heterogeneous ontologies. This situation is being witnessed in the design and manufacture stages of the product lifecycle, and raises an issue whenever disparate ontologies have to be made interoperable with each other to promote design and manufacturing knowledge sharing among stakeholders. Ontology mapping provides a convenient direction to overcome the problem of ontology heterogeneity. This paper identifies the nature of semantic mismatches and essential elements that need to be taken into account for ontology mapping. Simple examples are provided at various stages to support arguments.